Eius: E-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Project: Models Name(S) of Project Partner(S): University of Manchester (ESRC Ncess)
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Cover Sheet for Proposals JISC Capital Programme (All sections must be completed) Name of Capital Programme: e-Infrastructure Programme Strand: (Please tick ONE BOX ONLY, as appropriate) e-Research Community Engagement & Support Call I – Barriers to Take-Up Call II – Support for Research: Call III – Use Cases and of e-Infrastructure Services Tools & Standards Service Usage Models e-Infrastructure Security Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services Call IV – Federated Tools Call V – Virtual Organisation Call VI – Semantically and Services Management Tools and Coordinating Resources and Services Services Across Registries a) Tools for the a) Integration of Grid a) Area A – integration of establishment of VOs and Shibboleth Resources and Services from Existing JISC Services b) Developing and b) Services and UIs for Applying n-tier Web Service management of VOs b) Area B – Metadata for Architectures Services, Data, and Published c) Federation membership Literature c) Applying existing models for VOs virtual home for identity d) Delegated solutions authorisation Name of Lead Oxford University Institution: Name of Proposed eIUS: e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Project: Models Name(s) of Project Partner(s): University of Manchester (ESRC NCeSS) Full Contact Details for Primary Contact: Name: Dr Michael Fraser Position: Head of Research Technologies Service Email: [email protected] Address: Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN Tel: 01865 283343 Fax: 01865 273275 Length of Project: 24 months Project Start Date: 1 March 2007 Project End 28 February 2009 Date: Total Funding Requested from £336,873 JISC: 1 Funding Broken Down over Financial Years (April - March): Apr06 – Mar07 Apr07 – Mar08 Apr08 – Mar09 £12,559 £168,635 £155,679 Total Institutional Contributions: Percentage Contributions over 70% JISC 30% PARTNERS the Life of the Project: Outline Project Description The overall aim of eIUS, the e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models project, is to articulate, through the publication of use cases and the contribution of domain and Service Usage Models (SUMs), how the research community across different disciplines are actually or planning to engage with e-infrastructure. A deeper analysis of the use of existing e-infrastructure provision, both national and local, will also inform service development models which have hitherto been driven by the requirements of the early adopters. A crucial outcome of this project therefore, through the provision of dynamic use cases, is to broaden participation in the use and the future development of e-infrastructure services. The project will develop a comprehensive set of structured use cases, each containing a series of scenarios, which encapsulate how members of the UK research community are, or intend, to use e-infrastructure services as a key element in their research workflows. The use cases will form the basis for developing domain models and SUMs. Whilst the project assumes a broad definition of e-research, not restricted solely to activities within the e-Science Core Programme, it is recognised that the UK e-Science programme has achieved significant success in promoting the adoption of e-infrastructure across a range of research fields (including the social sciences and, increasingly, the arts and humanities). In order to achieve a broad sweep of disciplines and facilitate the prioritisation of scenarios for inclusion within the use cases, the project will collaborate with the existing e- infrastructure providers to develop a network of researchers formed from existing e-infrastructure service user communities. The eIUS project will be undertaken jointly between the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) at the University of Manchester and the Research Technologies Service (RTS) together with the e-Horizons Institute and the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) at the University of Oxford. Both institutions are leading international centres in e-Science. The project will build on a range of relevant activities in which the partners are already engaged with members of their respective communities. The project will be led by the Research Technologies Service within Oxford University Computing Services. I have looked at the example FOI form YES at Appendix A and included an FOI form in the attached bid (Tick Box) I have read the Circular and associated YES Terms and Conditions of Grant at Appendix B (Tick Box) 2 Introduction 1. The overall aim of the eIUS: e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models project is to articulate, through the publication of use cases and the contribution of domain and service usage models (SUMs), how the research community across different disciplines are actually or planning to engage with e-infrastructure. We understand e-infrastructure to be the distributed network, services, tools, middleware and support operations which facilitate the research community’s discovery of, and access to, data collections and repositories, computational resources, data analysis and simulation tools, advanced communication or collaboration technologies. Examples include the National Grid Service (NGS), the national data centres, the visualisation and text mining networks, support centres for the Access Grid, digital curation, and the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII). The project will not confine itself to national e-infrastructure but also gather evidence from the use of international and local, institutional e-infrastructure, taking advantage of relevant services and tools being developed within the partner institutions (e.g. institutional repositories and campus grids). We define the research which requires the use of e-infrastructure to be e-research and our assumption is that whilst e-research includes all discipline areas, there are some research areas which are increasingly dependent on e-infrastructure services. Virtual research environment and digital repository projects, for example, offer a potentially useful source of user interaction with e-infrastructure across a range of subject areas. A deeper analysis of the use of existing e-infrastructure provision will also inform service development models which may have hitherto been driven by the requirements of the early adopters. A crucial outcome of this project therefore, through the provision of dynamic use cases, is to broaden participation in the use and the future development of e-infrastructure services. 2. The eIUS project will develop a comprehensive set of structured use cases, each containing a series of scenarios, which encapsulate how members of the UK research community are, or intend, to use e- infrastructure services as a key element in their research workflows. The use cases will form the basis for developing domain models and SUMs. Whilst the project assumes a broad definition of e-research, not restricted solely to activities within the e-Science Core Programme, it is recognised that the UK e-Science programme has achieved significant success in promoting the adoption of e-infrastructure across a range of research fields (including the social sciences and, increasingly, the arts and humanities). However, the experiences of early adopters which are potentially so valuable for widening the e-infrastructure community are in danger of being lost. Gathering an understanding of the working methods of e-research is critical for determining the future direction for service provision. The project will therefore help to keep service and technology provision aligned with actual requirements. Through the development of a structured schema to represent use cases, the project will capture experiences in an accessible form, for human interactive consumption and machine-to-machine Web Services-based consumption. Strength of the partnership 3. The eIUS project will be undertaken jointly between the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) at the University of Manchester and the Research Technologies Service (RTS) together with the e-Horizons Institute and the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) at the University of Oxford. Both institutions are leading international centres in e-Science. The project will build on a range of relevant activities in which the partners are already engaged with members of their respective communities. The project will be led by the Research Technologies Service within Oxford University Computing Services. 4. The project will build on the partners’ existing work in the area of social shaping of e-infrastructures, specifically: the NCeSS Oxford e-Social Science node (Marina Jirotka); the NCeSS ESRC-funded e- infrastructure project; the e-Science Institute Theme on ‘Adoption of e-Research Technologies: from prototype to commodity’ (lead by Alex Voss, and overseen by Rob Procter and Tom Rodden); and Accelerating Transition to Virtual Research Organisation in Social Science (AVROSS), an EU funded project which is studying requirements and options for accelerating the transition from traditional research to virtual research organisations through e-infrastructures (co-investigator Rob Procter). 5. Since the inception of the UK e-Science Programme in 2001, Oxford (through both the RTS and the OeRC) has been involved in over 40 projects, intersecting all seven of the research disciplines defined by the UK research councils. Examples of the use of e-Infrastructure developed by these projects are found in activities as diverse as conducting large-scale distributed earthquake simulation experiments